“In other words, I’d just keep on doing what he’s doing,” says the late Paul Harvey at the conclusion of his oration “If I Were the Devil.”
One gets the clear sense, from that short radio essay which Paul Harvey apparently delivered first in 1965 and then updated a few times since (and as far as I know the link posted here is to the most recent inception), that Paul Harvey believed strongly in Christian theology, believed that America should be a predominantly Christian nation, and believed that adherence to that theology was what America needed to be a safe, prosperous, and moral nation. The things he says he would do if he were the Devil are, of course, things that he sees being done that he objects to–not only objects to, but considers evil, the work of the actual Devil. Fair enough, for someone who holds that religious belief and those moral values, but from a historian’s point of view some interesting observations also appear worth making, because the Devil–or rather, the belief that the Devil is at work in America–has a long and not particularly proud history on our soil.
Much of what Paul Harvey laments in this speech is what one could expect a reasonable person to lament–the need for drug-sniffing dogs and metal detectors, prisons overflowing, nations at war with each other, clergy committing abuses against children–while some of it is pure theology. (“To the young, I would whisper that the Bible is a myth. I would convince them that man created God instead of the other way around.”)
And then there are the parts that are pure, unadulterated political opinion enshrined in the conceit of what he would do as the Devil: “And the old I would teach to repeat after me, ‘Our Father, which art in Washington.’ … If I were the Devil, I would take from those who have and I would give to those who wanted, until I had killed the incentive of the ambitious.” We’ve heard that before, of course: the idea that federal social welfare programs are all about encouraging dependence on government at the expense of self-reliance–not just that that sometimes happens when programs are administered in a certain way to certain people, but that that’s what they’re all about. When a political opinion is shaped and cultivated in such simple terms, then it’s hardly a stretch for conservative Christians to incorporate that opinion into the sense of a struggle between the forces of God and of the Devil, which of course is what Paul Harvey is playing to there. Where he refers to “the old,” I can only guess that he’s talking about Social Security and Medicare being instances of Washington worship, which he seems to want to equate with Devil worship.
But probably the most telling part of that manifesto is what he says at the start: “If I were the Prince of Darkness, I’d want to engulf the whole world in darkness, and I would have a third of its real estate and four-fifths of its population, but I wouldn’t be happy until I had seized the ripest apple on the tree, thee, so I’d set about however necessary to take over the United States.”
Wow, did yo hear that?
Paul Harvey–and all the people who think that radio speech is so profound and prophetic–is saying that the United States is the part of the world of the greatest interest to the Devil, and that he’ll be most gratified at having thwarted God’s intents if he can only deceive hitherto Christian Americans into going down his path of destruction. And of course, for America to be special to the Devil, it has to have been special to God first. Americans must really be God’s chosen people, for the battle for human souls to be at its most intense when it comes to this population.
Parts of the country, of course, were founded on this belief. I say parts because, although all of the English settlements in North America in the seventeenth century brought Christian churches with them (and Dutch, in the case of what is now New York), it was only the New England colonies, starting with Plymouth Plantation in 1620 and Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1630, that were actually founded for the purpose of being godly societies. There is much myth about them, of course, including the idea that the principle of religious freedom had anything to do with their motives (with the exception of Roger Williams, who founded Rhode Island), but some basic facts need to be remembered, to see the parallel with the way we hear Paul Harvey talking in our own recent times.
The founders of Puritan New England truly believed that God had expressly called them–this particular set of Christians–to get on board a boat and sail from England to North America, build their houses, plant their crops, and create a godly commonwealth centering their laws and their lifestyles on Calvinist Christian theology. Formal church membership was limited to those who could demonstrate that they were true believers (there were many among them who worshiped and obeyed the laws without being of that status), and only formal church members could vote in the civil elections. While the ministers and the political office holders were two different sets of people, that barely mattered, as the office holders–like the voters who put them in office–were steeped in exactly the same theology as the ministers were. It was thus, to all intents and purposes, a theocracy.
And where did the Devil come in? Well, because this holy commonwealth was God’s special project, naturally it would get some special attention from the Devil as well. The Devil would try to sow divisions in their congregations. The Devil would infuse heresies–deviations from pure Calvinist doctrine–into their thinking. The Devil would try to tempt them to commit adultery, covet their neighbors’ goods, and so forth. What was special was that, if the Devil succeeded, he would not only be stealing individual souls from God, but wrecking God’s special nation, God’s “city on a hill.”
North America was, of course, already inhabited by an indigenous population. What was the proper relationship between the Puritans and their Indian neighbors? They actually had two different theologies to draw from, and they drew from both at various times. One was Christ’s charge “Make ye disciples of all the nations,” and indeed they made some converts (“praying Indians”). But when the predictable skirmishes over land encroachment occurred, Puritan leaders and warriors were also quite capable of interpreting easy victories as signs that God was helping them, and defeats in battle as signs that there had been some sinning in their midst that God was angry at, showing the clear influence of the early books of the Hebrew Bible where wars had that connotation for the Israelites. It was along these lines that they believed God was helping them in 1637 when they burned Pequot Indians alive in an encampment, shooting some of those who escaped and selling others into slavery. There were also some clergy who interpreted the biblical line “The earth is the Lord’s, and the fullness thereof” as meaning that the Lord’s people (that is, themselves) owned the earth and thus were entitled to claim whatever land they desired.
But I want to return to the Devil now, because there was a key feature of their belief about Old Nick that played a huge part in what their experiment ended up being known for. The Devil’s powers, according to the beliefs of these pious New Englanders, were not limited to tempting Christians to sin. He could also tempt them to avail themselves of his dark magical powers and cast spells on others that would cause them physical harm. He could, in other words, tempt them to become witches and wizards.
Most notorious and best remembered now, of course, are the Salem witch trials of 1692. Exactly why so many people were hanged for witchcraft in one year in one region of the colony is, of course, a mystery that a number of historians have attempted to explain, each taking a different angle, but amid the differing interpretations, this much is clear: there was a community of people who deeply believed that they were God’s chosen, that the Devil was assailing God’s chosen, that he was doing so with the instrument of witchcraft, and that God, through the line “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live,” was at that moment commanding them to put a number of their fellow community members to death as witches. (Ironically, at least some of those who were executed were the most pious Christians of all, considering that they could save themselves by making false confessions–which some others did–but rather they chose death, confident that God knew they were not witches and that they were going to heaven when they died.)
As I write about the 17th century from a 21st-century perspective, I do not think it is too brash of me to say that these people were living in a fantasy world. Please let me explain what I mean by that. It is, of course, true that historians and other research scholars–this definitely includes anthropologists whose specialty is religion–must treat anything that cannot be scientifically proven to exist as a myth or a fiction, which is not to say that it doesn’t really exist in an invisible world that’s just off the radar of humanmade scientific instruments. But that isn’t what I’m talking about. I’m not saying they were living in a fantasy world because they believed in God and the Devil. I’m saying that they were living in a fantasy world because they believed that they had been specially called by God for this “errand into the wilderness” and that God and the Devil were battling, not just for each individual soul (a theology which long predated their own lifetimes) but for the corporate soul of Massachusetts Bay Colony.
And thus did Paul Harvey, in his “If I Were the Devil” oratory, play to the fantasy world that some people are living in today–not just that God and the Devil are striving for individual souls, but that the United States of America is exceptional, that it is under siege by the Devil for that reason, and…most importantly…that social welfare programs are the work of the Devil. Under other circumstances, even political conservatives might go down a list of social welfare programs and say “This one works, that one can use some improvement, here’s one that really shouldn’t be here,” but if one goes along with Paul Harvey’s speech, thinking like that is tantamount to making a deal with the Devil, letting the Devil have an inch so he can later take a mile.
Binary thinking–reducing complex issues of what national policies should be to simple either-or, good-against-evil dimensions and casting those who hold opposing views as being arrayed with the forces of darkness–has a long history in this country, but it’s not particularly helpful or constructive. But people have their narratives…
I’m not done with either the Puritans or the Salem witch trials. I have a few more points to make. As some might predict, these points will have some connection with my understanding of how we were able to get Donald Trump for a president. Coming up soon.
